Jessica Stockholder
[9] She attracted recognition in the late 1980s through exhibitions organized by PS1, Mercer Union (Toronto), The Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh),[17][34] and soon after, American Fine Arts (New York), Le Consortium (France), the Whitney Museum (including the 1991 Biennial), and Renaissance Society (Chicago), among others.
[42][12][4] David Pagel described her installations as "unglamorous inventories of readily available items [and] rambunctiously open-ended yet rigorously structured constellations," in which "unpretentious, anyone-could-do-it ingenuity bridges the gap between dreamy idealism and down-to-earth pragmatism.
"[12] Stockholder's work has been discussed in relation to the development of installation art and to art-historical traditions and figures including Cézanne and early modernism (e.g., Matisse, Cubism and Kurt Schwitters), Action, Color field and Hard-edge painting, Minimalism, Anthony Caro, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Robert Rauschenberg.
[42][3][44] Michael Kimmelman, contrasting the irony and social commentary of installation contemporaries (Cady Noland, Jason Rhoades and Nancy Rubin), distinguished the "funky lunacy" and wit of Stockholder's work as more sensory, poetic, romantic and celebratory.
[45][9][16] Throughout her career, Stockholder's work has largely been divided between temporary, site-specific installations created for quasi-public spaces such as museums and more human-scaled, autonomous assemblages or sculptures, often built in her studio and exhibited in galleries.
[8][16][13] Michael Kimmelman described it as raucous and operatic, with blocks of bouncing high-key color and multiple vantage points creating the experience of "entering a Matisse cutout, David Hockney stage set" or Frank Gehry structure.
She wrote that the work "domesticated" art history, with overflowing contents—lamps, linoleum, dropped ceiling, upended wheelbarrow, and trailer truck with tires painted swimming-pool blue—that stripped modernist reference points such as Mondrian and minimalism of their typical moral gravity and utopian strivings.
[11] Critics suggest that Stockholder's later installations and exhibitions invite a greater degree of connectivity and viewer participation by incorporating "viewing" ramps and platforms, locally salvaged materials and objects,[4][43] and other artists' work.
"[59][64] During this period, Stockholder created temporary installations at the SITE Santa Fe biennial (Bird Watching, 2001; assembled with materials salvaged from storage bins at Los Alamos),[65][66] Rice University (Sam Ran Over Sand, 2005),[4] and PS1 (Of Standing Float Roots in Thin Air, 2006).
[68] Artforum described the former work as "a careful calibration of strange-bedfellow(s)"—a fluorescent-yellow locker, blue tabletops, strings of foil pans, old fur coats, stacked greenhouses, varied lighting and a raised wooden ramp—that vacillated "between screwball comedy and the sublime.
Flooded Chambers Maid (2009, Madison Square Park) combined industrial materials, blue rubber mulch, bleachers, buckets, bins and a free-form garden into a vibrant, three-dimensional Constructivist-like painting that visitors sat, lunched and played on.
[1][6] For Color Jam (2012), she blanketed the four corners and buildings surrounding a busy downtown Chicago intersection in swaths of burnt orange, lime green and turquoise, creating an effect the New York Times deemed "Christo meets Hans Hofmann.
[75][76] The show "Door Hinges" (Kavi Gupta, 2015) featured three assists strapped with vinyl belts to a piano, vintage desk, and Smart electric car, respectively, and an ephemeral installation with a snaking catwalk, titled A Log or a freezer.
"[56] "The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room" (Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 2016) was an immersive exhibition including two assists, autonomous sculptures, and an ephemeral "situation" made up of a winding, scalable platform-stage that enabled the viewing of drawings which were hung over swaths of orange and pink painted on the gallery walls.
David Pagel described the "EWaste" pieces—reworkings of found electronic devices and hardware into abstract sculptures—as "slyly subversive," tautly composed amalgams combining free-associative speculation with the formal power of Matisse's cut-paper collages.
